Review: Dreamers Awake

Ah, the summer holidays. Time to catch up on all of the shows I've been dying to see, but haven't had chance to yet...

First off, Dreamers Awake, the current exhibition at the White Cube, Bermondsey. The gallery say (in some detail):

White Cube is pleased to present ‘Dreamers Awake’, a group show at White Cube Bermondsey which explores the enduring influence of Surrealism through the work of more than fifty women artists. The exhibition brings together sculpture, painting, collage, photography and drawing from the 1930s to the present day and includes work by well-known Surrealist figures as well as contemporary and emerging artists. Woman has a powerful presence in Surrealism. She is the object of masculine desire and fantasy; a harpy, goddess or sphinx; a mystery or threat. Often, she appears decapitated, distorted, trussed up. Fearsome or fetishized, she is always the ‘other’. From today’s perspective, gender politics can seem the unlikely blind spot of a movement that declared war on patriarchal society, convention and conformity.
Nonetheless, from its earliest days female artists have been drawn to Surrealism’s emphasis on personal and artistic freedoms and to the creative potential that the exploration of the unconscious offered. By focusing on the work of women artists, ‘Dreamers Awake’ hopes to show how, through art foregrounding bodily experience, the symbolic woman of Surrealism is refigured as a creative, sentient, thinking being.
Repossessed by its owner, the fragmented, headless body of Surrealism becomes a vehicle for irony, resistance, humour and self-expression. Ranging beyond those who might identify themselves as Surrealists, the show traces the influence of the movement where artists delve into the unconscious; create alternative realities; invent fetishistic objects, such as Mona Hatoum’s Jardin Public (1993), that subvert the objectification of the female form, or, in the spirit of Claude Cahun’s iconic black and white self-portraits from the 1930s, play with gender identity as a fluid construct.

My first impression was that Dreamers Awake represented a particularly strong showing of work by women. Exploring the ideas of surrealism, it's a bold reclamation of a genre that has historically objectified the female form, so the work on show feels very powerful.

If you think about the images you connect with the idea of 'surrealism,' once you get beyond melting clocks, you probably call to mind close-cropped images of the body, or even oddly-disembodied limbs: for the Surrealists, the bodies of women were part of their language of expression. What Dreamers Awake does is return a sense of agency to women so they can make the symbolism of surrealism their own mode of expression.
The diversity of the ways in which this expression achieved is stunning; a painting by Dorothea Tanning, photography by Claude Cahun, and sculpture by Louise Bourgeois draw the mind in different directions, whilst circling back round to the concerns of identity and gender. The body of work on show is divergent, but the overall point of the exhibition holds it together with a clear sense of narrative.

I really enjoyed this show, and not just for the quality of the art. The fact that this major exhibitions is female-focused offered an exciting insight into an area of art that everyone thinks they know. As far as I'm concerned, it is well worth seeing.


4/5: A glorious wakeup call from the women of Surrealism
White Cube,
Bermondsey.
Until 17th September

Review: Anselm Kiefer - Walhalla

Walhalla is Anselm Kiefer's latest exhibition and, currently situated at White Cube Bermondsey, it is really rather brilliant.
The White Cube have the following to say about it:

Titled ‘Walhalla’, the exhibition refers to the mythical place in Norse mythology, a paradise for those slain in battle, as well as to the Walhalla neo-classical monument, built by Ludwig I King of Bavaria in 1842 to honour heroic figures in German history.

This gives you the context, but does nothing to describe the atmosphere.

You enter a corridor, something that wouldn't be out of place in a field hospital set up during some hellish war: dark, metallic beds line the walls on either side, which, you notice as you get closer, are sometimes labelled with the names of figures from Norse mythology or Germanic folklore. Branching off from this corridor are a series of rooms, some housing paintings, others instillations.

The instillation work is fascinating in its ability to raise questions about well known narratives and subvert any expectation you have about the idea of what 'Valhalla' might be. Everything is grimy, harsh, toxic: you think about what being slain in battle might mean in the contemporary world. Meanwhile, when you depart for the more brightly lit rooms housing the mixed-media paintings, the rawness of the work, combined with their sheer scale, makes for a powerful, almost overwhelming, experience. The diversity of this body of work in terms of technique is at the same time held together by unifying ideas, materials and shapes that echo through all of the rooms. Kiefer has taken an idea and explored it inside and out. The result is jaw-dropping.

Walhalla is one of the best exhibitions I've seen this year, both in terms of scope and ideas, and in its aesthetics and realisation. It is really worth the trip out to Bermondsey to go and explore it for yourself: my brief description here has not done it justice. You only have until February, so get a move on!

5/5 - A mythic combination of installation, sculpture and painting: go and lose yourself in the stories

White Cube Bermondsey
144-152 Bermondsey St
London
SE1 3TQ 

23 November 2016 – 12 February 2017